BOOKS by FLORA J. SOLOMON

A Short Biography

I was married with three young children before I discovered how much fun writing can be. In order to escape the physical toil of diapers and drool, I enrolled in a creative writing class at the local college. It was there I found I could make people laugh, which was a delightful surprise, because I tend to be rather reserved. The class was three credits and cost $11 per credit hour, and that gives a clue to how old I am.

I grew up in the post-World War II years. My grandfather and grandmother were nurses. My mother was trained as a nurse, and though she never worked outside the home, she was the “go to” person in the neighborhood when someone needed patching up. My many uncles had served overseas, and pictures of them in uniform were carefully preserved in albums. Steel helmets, scratchy army blankets, and canvas cots were common in most homes in my neighborhood as were foreign coins, German buttons, and military patches. My friends and I dug foxholes and played War complete with an arsenal of cap guns, jack knives, and hand grenades (empty soup cans.) We all knew whose uncle hadn’t returned from the war, whose father was having a problem with alcohol, and which families had broken from the strain of battle fatigue—the yet unrecognized post-traumatic stress disorder.

Though the war was over, the country feared Russian aggression, and communities prepared for it by building bomb shelters. My parents contributed hardtack (think dog biscuits) to help supply the shelter underneath my elementary school. Periodically there were air raid drills, when we, as students, descended a metal staircase into the cool, weirdness of the shelter to sit with our backs against the wall. When we were settled, the janitor turned out the lights, and we were plunged into blackness. This memory came back to me when I first read about the nurses living and working in the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor.

I finished my college education and became a working mom, first as a biochemical researcher, and then as a healthcare analyst, sitting long hours at the computer mining data. I never forgot, though, that creative writing class and the joy and wonder it brought to me.

The morning after I retired, I booted up the computer and typed, “Chapter One.” For a long time, the cursor blinked at me on an otherwise blank page. I needed a storyline and a heroine. While researching ideas, I ran across accounts of the World War II army nurses who served in the Philippines. I felt at home in that time period and in the nursing milieu. It took me eight years to research, write, and self-publish A Pledge of Silence. Subsequently, it won first place for General Fiction in the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, and with that honor, a publishing contract with Lake Union Publishing, an Amazon imprint.

It was a mind-boggling experience!

With time on my hands and a file cabinet full of research, I forged ahead to book number two, Along the Broken Bay. Choosing the subject matter was easy…I would weave a story about those brave people who endured the Japanese occupation outside the prison camps. My difficultly lay on where to focus the voice of the story: on the journalists who obtained much of their information from forbidden radio broadcasts, on medical personnel who provided contraband drugs to the prisoners, on government officials who collaborated with the underground, on the guerrillas in the mountains who unceasingly harassed Japanese military units, or the missionary families who hid in the swamps to avoid capture or worse. Though these factions show up in my story, in the end my choice was to focus the spotlight on an American woman who opened a nightclub in Manila to support the guerrillas, and who then became a spy for the Allied forces. My reasoning for selecting and fictionalizing her amazing tale was to bring music, dance, and color to an otherwise dark subject.

Thank you for visiting my website. I wish you hours of pleasant reading about a time, place and people who have had very little light shined onto them.